Book review: Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington

Eighty years before “branding” had become the familiar hard-nosed term for the packaging and selling of entertainers, Duke Ellington was a dreamlike synthesis of image, talent and social relevance. As a black jazz titan in a racist age – he rose to stardom in the 1920s –he had a weighty double role: to lift jazz to the level of concert music and to win respect for his race.

Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington

TERRY TEACHOUT

The Robson Press, 496pp, £25

He triumphed on both counts. Ellington played piano, but his real instrument was the orchestra. The sound he created was a tapestry of bluesy textures, lowdown swing and solo instrumental voices that growled, cried or wailed. His compositions, from It Don’t Mean a Thing (if It Ain’t Got That Swing) to the Black, Brown and Beige suite, glorified the black experience and earned him comparisons to Prokofiev and Stravinsky. All the while he had one crowning goal: to entertain “without compromising the dignity of the Negro people.”

His was a grand tightrope act. Dressed in tails, grinning broadly from the piano, he was suave and impeccable. Ellington couldn’t let the public see his flaws, and he had many, from his relentless womanizing to his penchant for hogging credit from his collaborators. He knew that a black man in his position had to seem superhuman; anything less might cause a response articulated by Lena Horne: “There go those black people messing up again.”

In his 1973 memoir, Music Is My Mistress, he merely polished the facade. A 1987 biography by James Lincoln Collier focused on the music and sidestepped the personality. Ellington’s newest biographer, Terry Teachout, delves behind “the mask of smiling, noncommittal urbanity that he showed to the world.”As in his biography of Louis Armstrong, he keeps his psychoanalysing within safe limits; he contextualises historically without sounding contrived, and honours his subject’s musical achievements through just the right amount of close analysis.

He traces Ellington’s cultivated veneer to his turn-of-the-century childhood in Washington DC. Middle-class blacks of the time, like his parents, knew that upward mobility depended on adopting the whitest mannerisms possible. Ellington’s father, a butler, dressed and spoke in a high-flown, fussy fashion; he and his wife, Daisy, groomed their son to do the same.

Musically, the young Ellington was largely self-taught, and soon moved away from his first love, ragtime. He unleashed his new sound at the Cotton Club in 1927, and his “jungle music” thrilled white audiences with its raw vivacity. The band’s dark, moaning horns held the essence of the blues; to Ellington, they evoked “the mass singing of slaves.”

He needed a powerful white champion to truly make it big, and he had found one in Irving Mills, a music publisher who managed the band. Mills helped polish its image: he handled the business side and took – up to 50 per cent of the band’s income, doctored many Ellington songs and took co-writer credit. Ellington accepted it all as the necessary trade-off for stardom.

The formula worked. Hits tumbled out of him. He liked to compose piecemeal in rehearsals with the band, assembling songs like jigsaw puzzles. Ellington was no great melodist; his players’ improvised solos were often the source of his tunes. Some later sued him.

One who stayed quiet was Billy Strayhorn, the composer and arranger whom Ellington trombonist Lawrence Brown called “the genius, the power behind the throne.” Meticulously schooled and much more harmonically advanced than his employer, Strayhorn lifted the band to its highest refinement, even though Ellington followed Mills’s example and put himself down as co-author. Professionally, Strayhorn seemed doomed to live in the shadows, in part because he was gay and had opted not to hide it.

Teachout relates even the most dramatic episodes in the Ellington story with a poised impartiality. He doesn’t take a novelistic approach, nor does he describe music with the lyrical flights of fancy favoured by such writers as Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. He particularly shines in his portraits of Ellington’s renowned sidemen, including Jimmie Blanton, Ben Webster, Paul Gonsalves and Juan Tizol. As the largely unsung heroes of the band, they could be angry, sloppy or alcoholic. For all of Ellington’s obsessive drive for control, he hadn’t the nerve to discipline them.

By the late ’40s the swing era had entered a decline, and so did Ellington. His prestige and his record sales sagged; many of his key musicians left. Ellington kept writing ambitious thematic works, but most were panned as pretentious and weak. Rarely had Ellington allowed even a flash of bitterness to peek through, but he couldn’t hide it in 1965, when the Pulitzer Prize board members rejected a proposal to give him a lifetime achievement award. Ellington denounced their snobbery toward nonclassical forms, and hinted at possible racism.

In Teachout’s poignant last pages, the jazz giant is broke and passé, yet still addicted to a lonely life on the road with a band he couldn’t afford to maintain. When he died of pneumonia after a diagnosis of lung cancer, in 1974, he owed the taxman more than half a million dollars.

Yet none of his missteps have dimmed the Ellington legend, and Teachout’s biography ultimately humanises a man whom history has kept on a pedestal.

This website and its associated newspaper adheres to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice.
If you have a complaint about editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then contact the
Editor by clicking here.

If you remain dissatisfied with the response provided then you can contact the IPSO by
clicking here.

The Scotsman provides news, events and sport features from the Edinburgh area. For the best up to date information relating to Edinburgh and the surrounding areas visit us at The Scotsman regularly or bookmark this page.

For you to enjoy all the features of this website The Scotsman requires permission to use cookies.

Find Out More ▼

What is a Cookie?

What is a Flash Cookie?

Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?

About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.

This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.

Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.

The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:

Revenue Science ►

A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Google Ads ►

Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Digital Analytics ►

This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.

Dart for Publishers ►

This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.

ComScore ►

ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.

Local Targeting ►

Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.

Grapeshot ►

We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.

Subscriptions Online ►

Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.

Add This ►

Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.